Jhok

When Haribabu got married there was feasting for three days. Every evening the lamps in the courtyard shone on rows of guests seated before freshly washed plantain leaves and the house resounded with the noise of food bearers being called in four different directions at once. There were heaps of puffed luchis, mounds of saffron flavoured rice studded with kishmish, dal and chicken and mutton, and the fish! Fat river bred Ilish doused in mustard, and firm succulent Rui crisp from the frying pan.

The guests licked their fingers and belched and the servers ran here and there crying—“Rajendra Babu! More fish for you! . . . Prasan-da more mutton!” The guests grew shiny with the exertion of eating, and rolled their eyes in helplessness when more food swooped down on the leaves before them, and they smiled with praise for Haribabu’s generosity. Someone called jovially that they deserved such a feast for they had waited long enough for Haribabu to get married. The gusts of their laughter startled the dogs intent on the scraps outside the backdoor, and they scattered momentarily, only to slink back, teeth bared, eyes gleaming, to the mounds of leftovers that awaited them.

Upstairs Hari Prasad’s new wife heard the laughter and was coy and proud and nervous all at once. For she was sixteen and Hari Prasad was forty-five and owned twelve villages and a house with thirty-one rooms. But she was proud more than anything for having been chosen. Later that night she smiled her smile with the crooked teeth and one shy dimple at Hari Prasad and he was enchanted and wondered why he had waited so long.

Many of the guests returned over the next few weeks for Haribabu was in an expansive mood. Though, as was fitting, none ever saw the bride, her voice was heard calling through the house and whenever her anklet bells sounded down some unseen corridor hidden behind the heavy curtains, Haribabu was seen to smile. New furniture and red carpets were ordered from Calcutta and the poor were grateful, for that year Haribabu did not frown so much and dealt with unpaid dues with unheard-of laxity.

Then the monsoon came and it was a good one. When the rice grew like a carpet in the rain pocked fields, Durga returned to her people riding an elephant. Again there were days of feasting at the Thakurbari, for Haribabu’s wife who teased his stern ways and danced light-footed from room to room, and curled up like a child when she slept, was to be a mother.

When Durga had been escorted to the river and cast upon the waters, and Sitala left to decay by the riverside, Haribabu came to the Pandit’s house one blustery morning to consult him. He wished to set aside some of his wealth for his son—for a boy it was sure to be, his wife had promised him. She had consulted the local midwife, who, as everyone knew, had been born with a veil and could tell such things. For the first time Haribabu thought of a son. A child. Out of his own body. Maybe, someday, grandchildren. So Haribabu wished to bury a large part of his wealth in a safe place against his son’s need in bad times. He had chosen an unused room in his house and wished to make the treasure doubly safe by having it guarded. Of course it would have to be done in secret because such things were frowned upon now. The Pandit said he knew where he could find such a one. There was a poor family of good Brahmin stock, unfortunately fallen on bad times—but it would take money. Money Haribabu had in plenty, and so it was all arranged, with a special fee to the Pandit for the rites of purification.

Workers came, and though they worked in secret, there was dust everywhere and muddy footprints on the floor. Haribabu’s bride demanded to know what was happening, but when he told her it was all for the son stirring magically in her womb, she was content and went back to embroidering tiny vests and incessantly winding up a little clockwork brass train that had come from Lucknow, and teasing the parrot on a perch who called for nuts. Haribabu watched her and was glad that he had chosen this one above all. He was glad that she chattered all day and laid feathery fluttering lashes against his cheek and giggled when he was serious.

At last the room was ready and the Pandit sent word that the family had agreed. Only the mother had proved difficult to placate and the price was a little higher than he had thought it would be. Haribabu paid, and one night the Pandit came to the house by the back way carrying a bundle wrapped in a shawl, and panting a little under the weight. The room had been made ready and the bundle never stirred, so he chanted the rites and the invocations to the gods for safety. The bundle was lowered and the trap door dropped into place. Haribabu locked it with a triple lock, and then locked the door to the room with a fat lock that had come all the way from Hyderabad’s Meena Bazaar. He slipped something into the Pandit’s hand and the Pandit nodded and vowed secrecy.

Haribabu hurried back to where his wife lay breathing deeply. The light of the lamp woke her and she blinked drows-ily and smiled before sighing back into sleep. Haribabu climbed into bed well content.

The next night they had their first fight.

Haribabu woke at some indefinite hour in the night and found the place beside him empty. He listened in the darkness for the telltale jingle and clink of those well known anklets, but there was no sound. Just the normal creaks and groans of an old house deep in slumber. Then, from somewhere in the depths of the house, wavering and falling, came a thread of sound that all the accumulated noises of a household awake and about its work had smudged and obscured in the day. Somewhere in the house a child was crying. Faintly the note of sorrow rose and fell and wisped away into the darkness. Haribabu fumbled for his slippers.

His bride was standing at the door of the locked room listening intently. She started when he touched her hand, and for an instant her eyes grew vast and afraid. She shivered.

“It’s you” she said, slipping a tiny beringed hand into his. “You frightened me. Listen. Can you hear it?” Here, right by the door, the sound was unmistakable. A child was crying his heart out, as if alone and uncomforted.

“Come away from there,” said Haribabu, but she clung to his hand.

“Listen! Do you think it’s one of the servants” children? Who could have locked him in there and left him?”

“Come away from there!” said Haribabu, cursing the Pandit and sleeping potions that did not work.

“Do you have the key?” she asked, turning eager eyes up to him.

“Yes,” said Haribabu. “Leave it alone and come back to sleep.” For answer she clutched both his hands and gazed up at him.

“What is it?” she asked, “What is it?”

“The treasure you fool” he said, angered by the tiny hands that clutched him and the hopeful, sleep-swollen eyes that watched his face, “I have arranged for its safety.” She pulled

her hands away.

“No” she said “No. You cannot have. I won’t believe it.”

“What is there to believe?” he said harshly. “Come away and forget it.” He dragged her from the door and she cried as he pulled her along.

“I beg of you, give me the key. You cannot do this. It is cruel. I beg you give me the key!” He held her against the wall and said—“Enough! It is done. It is done for our son. Your son.” She raised two pleading hands and even in the dark he saw the tears that smeared across her face.

“I heard a child crying. Lonely and afraid—and I wished to comfort it. It is only a small child and alone in the dark. Please— for my sake. Give me the key.” He had to make his heart hard against the hesitant touch of those pleading hands.

“What of me?” he said. “Have you thought of that? It is forbidden by law. They will put me in jail. Do you want that?” She shook her head and even that was a plea. “I forbid you to say another word on this matter. It is done and finished.”

She didn’t say another word, but her sobs hiccoughed through the night and in the morning her eyes were puffed and red and she looked more like a child than ever. The parrot’s raucous demands for badam sounded louder through the house that day, for there was no laughter or the sound of an-klets, nor a young voice singing nonsense verse and silly rhymes to an unborn child. And Haribabu awoke in the night to find the bed empty again.

No sound stirred through the night, not even a forlorn voice sobbing its heart out somewhere in the bowels of the vast house, but Haribabu knew where his bride had gone. She was crouched against the door, listening carefully. And indeed if you listened carefully, you could still hear it. Very faint now, and very tired. Haribabu ordered her back to bed and forbade her to come to the room again. He awoke one more time in the night to find her awake. “Do you think he’s cold?” she asked. Haribabu pretended to be asleep.

On the third night he awoke to find her sitting propped against the headboard of the bed, hands still on the swelling of her belly. “He’s stopped crying” she said, and sat on unmoving through the night.

On the fourth night there were lights in Haribabu’s house at midnight and much banging of doors, and a doctor who came all the way from Beniapukur in Haribabu’s own car-riage. But long before the dawn touched everything with pal-lid fingers, Haribabu knew there would be no son to lay claim to the treasure he had so painstakingly secured against the years to come.

Then Haribabu’s wife was sick for a long time and the doctor came nearly every day. When winter came and the smoke lay heavy on the fields in the morning, Haribabu closed the big house and took his wife to Calcutta. They were gone for a long time.

Backs were bent in the fields, sowing the first rice crop of the year when they returned. They came in five carriages piled high with luggage, and in the last was Haribabu’s wife, wrapped in a shawl and propped up with many pillows. Haribabu carried her into the house and for the next week there was great dusting and cleaning and flinging open of rooms gone musty from months of neglect.

Haribabu’s wife lay quietly on her bed through it all and fed the parrot peanuts from fingers that were pale and so thin that the rings slipped off and rang against the floor. When the house-hold had settled down and all the luggage unpacked and put away, Haribabu awoke one night to find his wife missing. He knew where she had gone. He’d been half expecting it, half know-ing, waking times without number in the quiet of a Calcutta night with a beating heart and ears desperately searching the night for a sound—thin and wavering. Loud in the night. Quite lost in the noise of a household awake and about its business during the day.

She was standing listening at the door and she did not start when he approached but turned a pale face to him. How thin she has become thought Haribabu, and something infinitely hopeless turned and stirred within him. I have forgotten her laughter, he thought with a jolt of surprise, would not recognise it if she were to laugh now. His grave-faced wife held out a hand that would not be denied. “Give me the key.” He slipped it off the chain that hung around his neck and handed it to her.

The room smelt of rats. Ropes of cobwebs hung everywhere. “There’s nothing in here,” she said. Haribabu averted his eyes from the floor.

“I like this room,” said his wife, turning to him. “It can be our son’s nursery.” Haribabu opened his mouth to remind her that there would be no more children and the room was— but she was already at a window, rubbing the dusty glass and squinting into the dark.

“Oh, look. It overlooks the pond.” She turned back to him and her smile was fresh. “You will let me do this room up for our son, won’t you?”

The brass train, the parrot screeching on his silver perch, little dancing dolls from Rajasthan, a walnut-wood cradle from Kashmir, softest sheets, tiny vests embroidered with peacocks, coloured paper windmills from the fair, a delicate English china doll—all were shifted to the room. Cleaned up, the room proved to be delightful—flooded with sunshine and looking into the brilliant green of an overgrown pond. Much excitement there was, and many things ordered from places across India.

Haribabu did not have the heart to deny his bride. He was glad as each mysterious package arrived and she pounced on it with all the excitement of her sixteen-year-old heart and carried it off to the room. There were jointed wooden tumbling mon-keys from Kerala, a caparisoned rocking horse from a little shop in Hazratganj in Lucknow, rubber balls and a dog that wagged it’s tail from Calcutta, a bear with glass eyes from the winding gullies of Crawford Market in Bombay, wooden sol-diers from Gwalior and a delicate music box in which a balle-rina twirled, entranced by her own reflection, all the way from London.

The doctors told him it was madness, but he was glad, for there was laughter in the corridors again for a while, and ex-cited whispering and the sound of busy anklets. But when it was all done and the last package had arrived and his bride declared that the room was perfect—then loneliness came again to Haribabu. For his bride went away to the room, and all her laughter, her joy went with her. Every morning she rose at sunrise and was gone, returning late at night.

Haribabu was left with a presence that slept by his side at night and sometimes woke with a cry from dreams that re-treated into the dark when she tried to recall them. And the woman who lived with him was quiet and thin and scared of the dark. There were doctors again and medicines and advice until Haribabu grew tired of them and shut the door to all visitors.

Now there is silence in that house, in all the rooms except one. And Haribabu stands listening for hours at the door to the laughter and silly nonsense verse and jingles all pattering together in a happy stream—enough to delight the heart of any child. He listens and something inside him is broken and the ends rub together and hurt him; hurt dreadfully. So he stoops and walks like an old man and is careful with his words. And at night he holds his bride and soothes her when she is frightened, brings her water to drink and sits unmoving against the headboard through the long hours as she sleeps.

Of course there are no more feasts, and the poor turn to their images of mud to plead, for Haribabu listens to no cries for mercy.

The house is growing old now, as childless houses must. Soon it will blink its eyes shut one by one and hunch down close on the bones of all its buried secrets.